san francisco chronicle

Book Openers: A Shameless Plug for a Mouthy Family Friend

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Merle Haggard, Bill Graham, Jerry Garcia, Bonnie Raitt — Joel Selvin knew/knows them all.

And I’ve known Joel Selvin for most of his adult life.

My husband knew Joel as a mouthy little kid who used to ride around the Berkeley hills in the Selvin family convertible – standing up on the front seat, hair flying in the wind

Joey’s mom would be arrested for child endangerment today, but no matter, little Joel survived his in-your-face childhood to become one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most knowledgeable, persistent, in-your-face rock & roll journalists.

During his multi-decade career at the San Francisco Chronicle, Joel interviewed Graham, Haggard, Garcia, Raitt and countless others. Many of those interviews are republished in Joel’s newest book, Smart Ass: The Music Journalism of Joel Selvin.

Smart ass. The title suits him. You can always count on Joey to speak his mind, and then some.

Since leaving the Chronicle, Joel has found book-writing even more rewarding than newspapering. The book he coauthored with Sammy Hagar, Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, has spent time on the New York Times best seller list.

And Joel’s next project is just as promising.

I think this is one of the T-shirts I bought for Peter. An OK message is this for a mom to a son?

I haven’t bought any of Sammy Hagar’s music but I have bought a couple Ed Hardy T-shirts for my son. Hardy is the famed tattoo artist whose name is all over an edgy fashion brand, and now he’s writing a memoir with Joel for Thomas Dunne Books. I hope there are lots of pix.

In other words, Joel is having even more success with his books than he was as a newspaper journalist.

If I really want to get famous as a book author, maybe I should hang around with Joey a little more at his family’s gatherings. Study his style. Get mouthy.

I could do mouthy.

What I can’t do is ride around in a convertible with the top down, standing up in the front seat.

Smart Ass: The Music Journalism of Joel Selvin, by Joel Selvin, Parthenon Books, 2011, $19.95, paper.

Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, by Sammy Hagar with Joel Selvin. It Books/HarperCollins, $26.99.